Provision of teaching aids:

The Statute Law Society has good contacts across the range of bodies concerned with the production of legislation. A series of filmed interviews has been completed and distributed on DVDs to Law Schools. The DVDs feature a series of short interviews conducted with people directly involved in the process of the production of Acts of Parliament: 

The politician (Lord Falconer of Thoroton)

How a Government Minister gets proposals accepted for presentation as part of the Government’s legislative programme

A Minister’s role in taking a Bill through Parliament

The departmental lawyer (Michelle Dyson)

The process within a Government Department for development of the policy ideas underlying legislative proposals

The detailed development by a Government Department of proposals for legislation

The role of officials in a department in handling the passage of a Bill through Parliament

The drafter (Stephen Laws)

The role of Parliamentary Counsel at the planning stage of legislation

How Parliamentary Counsel sets about drafting an Act of Parliament

Pre-legislative scrutiny of Bills and the role of Parliamentary Counsel as a Bill proceeds through Parliament

Parliamentary officials (David Natzler from the House of Commons and Sarah Jones from the House of Lords)

The Parliamentary procedure for making an Act of Parliament

The Legal Adviser to Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights (Murray Hunt)

The role of the Joint Committee on Human Rights in the legislative process

The Law Commissioner (Lord Justice Etherton)

The role of the Law Commission in the legislative process

The material on the web and DVDs also contains a video of a lecture given by Stephen Laws, First Parliamentary Counsel (the government’s chief drafter of legislation) to students at Oxford University on 11 October 2010 about the process of drafting an Act of Parliament. 

The Statute Law Society gratefully acknowledges financial support from the UK Centre for Legal Education and from Herbert Smith LLP.  Thanks are also due to Oxford University for hosting the interviews on their ITunes page.

The Statute Law Society Council has been looking at the teaching of legislation and encouraging a debate within academic circles on how this might be improved since the autumn of 2009 and it was out of these discussions that the DVD project took shape. 

To read some of the background notes and papers arising out of the initial discussions click here.